The Democracy Movement and Matthias Rath *updated*

This blog has been updated with a response from the Democracy Movement to the original post and my subsequent reply (see end).

The Democracy Movement is an anti-EU lobbying group which arose from the ashes of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party with the help of funds from his wife, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, and businessman Paul Sykes. The Democracy Movement declares itself “a non-party campaign to defend liberal democracy in Britain and across Europe. “and is opposed to the single currency, the Lisbon Treaty and the EU Constitution.  The Democracy Movement see their role as working

[...] alongside groups similarly committed to challenging the current structure of the EU. In the eventuality of there being a referendum on the EU Constitution or the euro, the DM will give its support to the official umbrella campaign that will be appointed by the Electoral Commission. A broad popular alliance including democrats from the left, centre and centre-right will be needed to safeguard liberal democracy and prevent the creation of an authoritarian Brussels-based government.

So far, so mainstream UK anti-Europe thinking.  Another anti-EU organisation is the European Referendum Initiative (ERI).  This was founded by Matthias Rath, the vitamin salesman who conducted illegal AIDS trials in South Africa and supports AIDS denialism which is estimated to have contributed to over 300,000 deaths in South Africa alone.  The ERI regards attempts by the EU to regulate the sale of health products as a conspiracy by large pharmaceutical companies to facilitate medical experiments on the population similar to those inflicted on Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust. The Democracy Movement are now supporting the European Referendum Initiative.

Marian Harkin MEP, conspiracy theorist and big quacka shill

Early last year I blogged about the misleading statements made by some MEPs in trying to water down EU proposals for the regulation of the vitamin pill industry.  It appeared that these MEPs had been influenced by the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), then collaborating with the vitamin pill salesman and notorious AIDS denialist Matthias Rath whose activities in South Africa implicated him in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.  One of these MEPs was Marian Harkin, an Irish independent MEP, who I wrote to at the time expressing my concerns over the ANH and her position on supplementation (see letter below the fold).  Ms Harkin, in contrast to most other MEPs contacted, did not respond.  Now it seems Ms Harkin is supporting homeopathy and has fallen for the big pharma conspiracy line as peddled by homeopaths and the ANH (who incidentally have forbidden their staff from replying to my emails).

In a report written for the EU Observer it is claimed that the homeopathic lobby are trying to influence the EU on the regulation of alternative medicine.

Representatives of the industry, practitioners and patients that use homeopathic products are to hold an EU Homeopathy Day in the European Parliament on 23 March as the kick-off for a new effort to win EU-level alternative-medicine-friendly legislation.

EU Homeopathy day is an event organised by the European Coalition on Homeopathic and Anthroposophic Medicinal Products (Echamp), a lobby group composed of manufacturers of homeopathic products and their supporters.

The report also carries statements from Andy Lewis of the Quackometer and Ms Harkin.

Andy Lewis, the proprietor of the Quackometer website, which debunks quack medicine on the internet, said that the new campaign of European homeopathy lobby was at odds with the British parliament’s enquiry.

“The MPs concluded, after a very detailed review of the evidence, that homeopathy was scientifically implausible and could not be shown to be effective,” said Mr Lewis, who was also one of the organisers of a series of ‘homeopathy overdose’ demonstrations outside pharmacists across the UK in January in which sceptics swallowed entire bottles of homeopathy sugar pills. “The recommendation was that homeopathy should not be publicly funded and that medicines labeling regulations should not allow it to make unfounded claims. “

“The EU would be failing its citizens, and pandering to business interests, if it allowed homeopathy sugar pill manufacturers to make misleading claims about this discredited 18th Century quackery,” he added.

Ms Harkin, for her part, is familiar with such criticism, but dismisses it as in the service of Big Pharma: “There are those that believe that only those medicines prescribed by doctors and manufactured by Pfizer will make you well, but a lot of ordinary people do not subscribe to that view.”

“[The sceptics] are saying medicines must be judged by one critierion [sic] only, that it satisfies a scientific equation. Whereas there are many standards by which medicines should be judged,” she said.

“The agenda is to say that science has the answer to everything. Well, they should have learnt by now that it hasn’t.”

It appears that Ms Harkin did not heed my warnings and has now fallen for the conspiracy theories of the more obsessive supporters of homeopathy and clearly does not see the irony of condemning Big Pharma, who for the most part rely on scientific evidence, while shilling for Big Quacka, who don’t.  This is unfortunate for the voters of Ireland North and West as well as those that care for the proper scrutiny of alternative therapies.  Ms Harkin is supposedly representing the interests of the former and acting against those of the latter in the European Parliament.  Ms Harkin would be well advised to read the recent Science and Technology Committee report on homeopathy (pdf) which as good a discussion of the scientific evidence and policy implications of homeopathy as she’s ever likely to read.

I will be contacting Ms Harkin to remind her that while science does not have an answer to everything it is pretty good at evaluating the claims of alternative medicine, and these have been found wanting.  I will also send her a copy of the  report.

Homeopaths, Herbalists and Matthias Rath

There has been an exciting development in the world of herbalism.  A split.  A shattering of a previously indivisible atom of stupid and the release of a wave of witlessness, sweeping across the quackosphere, and leaving idiocy  in its wake.  Save our Herbs is its manifestation, and the reason they give for their existence is this:

The call for Statutory Regulation (SR) was started by a small group of herbalists, who have professed that Herbal Medicines are dangerous and the public need protection through statutory regulation, that such proposals would assure public safety.

The powers-that-be have no right to restrict the entitlement of the people of the UK to continue to use herbal medicines in the way that they currently do.

Yes, this is a group of herbalists who reject the suggestion that herbs can be dangerous and those who prescribe them need regulating. Paracelsus would disagree:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”

As would Whatstheharm.net and the National Insitute of Medical Herbalists (NIMH). And, as David Colquhoun points out, herbalist degrees show an imaginative approach to facts and evidence that creates a danger to the public.

Joining the herbalists are everybody’s favourite homeopath splitters, the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths (ARH), who too have rejected accusations of harm and the thought of statutory regulation.  Also involved are the National Health Foundation (NHF), a mainly American lobby group, the obscure International Register of Consultant Herbalists and Homoeopaths (IRCHH), the unknown Mohsin Institute and the invisible Cropwatch.

This coalition of uncertain competenecy are pushing anti-EU arguments, of the conspiratorial sort, as part of their campaign and this has led them to the parlous abandonment of mainstream Euroscepticism and a rush into the arms of arch AIDS denialist and conspiracy theorist Matthias Rath.  A fair assessment of Rath’s character as a charlatan and bully who bears some responsibility for the deaths of thousands can be drawn from this book chapter by Ben Goldacre.  Rath’s EU-referendum.org, who have come under some criticism before on this blog, are now citing SaveOurHerbs as official supporters.  Rath, in his EU-facts.org site, argues that the pharmaceutical and oil industries are using the Lisbon Treaty to create a European dictatorship.  I suspect this belief may have drawn the herbalists and homeopaths to his side.

Alternative heath practitioners and their supporters often believe that the reason why their therapies are often rejected has little to do with their inherent implausibility, the weight of convincing evidence against them, and the allegations of harm but is due to a grand conspiracy of politicans, journalists and bloggers funded by the pharmaceutical industry.  It is hardly surprising that many of them have a sufficiently strong belief in this to turn, without question, to the likes of Rath.  I do not know how representative of herbalists Save our Herbs is, but the ARH represent about a third of UK homeopaths and have a sufficiently strong voice to make the Society of Homeopath’s (SoH) desired pathway to statutory regulation a rocky road indeed.  I also suspect many SoH members may fall prey to the conspiracy adorned blandishments of Rath, the SoH after all are more than willing to endorse dangerous Rath-like AIDS nonsense even going as far to fund homeopathic trials in Africa.  It would be foolish to assume that the ARH’s embrace of Rath strengthens the case for regulation, it just draws further attention to the idiocies of all homeopaths.  I suspect the same may be true of these renegade Herbalists.